Young Activists Sue U.S., States Over Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Published: May 5, 2011

They might not be old enough to vote, but young climate activists are helping stage a legal campaign that seeks to force the federal government and all the states to curb greenhouse gas emissions because of their role in global warming.

Attorneys representing the children and teenagers filed yesterday, or are preparing to file, 52 separate lawsuits and petitions based on a novel legal theory: that the government has failed in its duty to protect the atmosphere as a "public trust" for future generations.

As a legal theory, the idea that the environment is a public trust has been around for centuries, and has often been used to protect water and wildlife. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in 1892 that Illinois lawmakers couldn't hand over a large portion of the Chicago harbor to the Illinois Central Railroad because the government was responsible for safeguarding waterways.

Similarly, that's the reason people usually need government licenses to shoot deer or catch fish. State and federal officials manage wildlife as a public trust to ensure that it remains plentiful.

The idea has never before been applied to the atmosphere, said Julia Olson, an attorney who led the legal team as executive director of the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children's Trust. But it captured the imagination of 16-year-old Alec Loorz of Ventura, Calif., who is helping run the legal campaign and has spent the past year finding teenagers across the country to sign onto the lawsuits.

"The legislative and executive branches of our government have failed us," Loorz said in an interview yesterday. "People have been trying to push for real change at the legislative level for a long time, and nothing has worked. That's why we're going after it through the judicial branch of government."

Among the cases is a federal lawsuit (pdf), filed late yesterday in district court in San Francisco, that names U.S. EPA and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy and Interior as defendants. The lawsuit asks the government to stop greenhouse emissions in 2012 and reduce them by 6 percent per year after that.

Loorz said he started focusing on climate change at age 12 after seeing former Vice President Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." Now, he and four other teenagers are the main plaintiffs in the federal case, which was assigned to Donna Ryu, a U.S. magistrate judge in Oakland, Calif.

Among the lawyers representing them is Pete McCloskey, a former Republican congressman from California who became a Democrat in 2006 for an unsuccessful bid to defeat former House Natural Resources Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.). In a statement yesterday, McCloskey described the public trust theory as "the most common-sense, fundamental legal footing for the protection of our planet."

Also participating in the lawsuit are Wildearth Guardians, a Colorado-based group that often sues the government to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, and Kids vs. Global Warming, a group that Loorz founded with support from the nonprofit Earth Island Institute.

The first states that will face lawsuits are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. Hawaii and New Jersey are going to be served with notices that lawsuits are coming, while the other 38 states and the District of Columbia will receive petitions that ask to put climate policies in place.

"What courts can do is, they can take the politics out of atmospheric protection, and they can put the science back in," Olson said. "They can establish the threshold of what needs to be done, and tell the government, you need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6 percent a year, so we can protect the atmosphere for future generations. We're not trying to tell government the ins and outs of how to do it."

Climate and common law

Legal experts say the new legal campaign parallels another common-law case brought by states and environmental groups that was heard by the Supreme Court earlier this year.